Paint Jam

Game Design Document:

#Introduction

* Game Summary: Exploration of a world without color by spreading paint.

* Inspiration: Untitled Swan, Drawn to Life, and metroidvanias.

* Player Experience: a metroidvania where you paint your path through the levels.

* Platform: Windows, PC.

* Development Software: Game Maker Studio 2, FL Studio, Paint.net, Aseprite.

* Genre: Metroidvania.

* Target Audience: Everyone (intermediate players).

#Concept:

* Gameplay Overview:

The player spawns into a gray, featureless area, and must spray paint so as to reveal the path ahead and restore colors to their surroundings.

* Theme Interpretation:

Given that the theme was "it's spreading", our thoughts converged towards the idea of paint spreading colors about. The idea there is that the spreading of the paint is synonymous with the restoration of life.

* Primary Mechanics:

-Wall jump: by jumping towards a wall and holding the direction, you cling onto that wall and can jump again from there, enabling you to chain wall jumps together to gain height.

-Dash: pressing the left shift key triggers a dash, a brief burst of speed towards the left or the right, depending on the direction the player is faced.

-Paint spray: using the left mouse button, you shoot paint in the direction your mouse is pointing. The projectile will damage enemies, but its main purpose is to spread paint onto the ground, walls and other objects, so as to reveal to the player the nature of their surroundings.

-Enemies: they are there to hinder the player's progress by erasing the spreaded paint and damaging the player with the projectile they shoot.

* Secondary Mechanics

-Paint burst: pressing E triggers a paint burst, a radial attack that spreads a lot of paint at once around the player. The idea there is that the paint burst is to be used as a way to easily dispose of enemies that might be trapping the player.

-Double jump: pressing the space bar again when the player has jumped will grant them extra height.

#Art

* Theme Interpretation:

We chose to interprete "It's spreading", not in a way where the player must stop something from spreading, but instead in a way where the player is effectively the one spreading something, in this case paint, in order to progress.

* Design:

Due to the game centering around paint, we had the main character look enigmatic but have a hat that resembles the top part of a paint spray can. The rest of the game is effectively the player spreading paint to make sense of their surrounding, which is why we have used splashes of paints with randomized colors.

#Audio

* Music:

We took the idea of the transition from colorless to colorful and combined it with harmonies, both visual and musical; since people associate harmonies with colorful pictures. As so, we went with minimalistic instruments that harmonise well for the menu and the game proper.

For the boss, we aimed to represent both the stature of said boss, but also the fact that it is the start of a great adventure. Therefore, we went for an uplifting feeling for the battle music. It is just the beginning, and more will come.

* Sound Effects:

The focus here was to provide good feedback to the player's action, so as to give them more depth, as well as amplify the immersion.

#Game Experience

* UI Using anti-aisling on the words in the beggining and saving data with the amount of times we reuse the same medium helps with the jutter of 2d side scrollers.

* Controls A and D to move left and right, space for jump and double jump when you get it, left shift to dash left or right, press left mouse button to shoot your paint everywhere, and use E to spread paint with your paint explosion ability.

#Development Timeline

The game data corrupted about 7 hours before the game jam ended. This is the best I could come up with in  that time on my limited knowledge, everything was submited on time. 

Adam Ethington ~ Programmer, Lead Design

Samuel Bouscaud ~ Pixel Artist

Idriss Elamrani Elidrissi ~ SFX and Music Design

Frank Blom ~ Programing Assistant

Twitch chat for helping fix the code and thanks for Digital Moons and

SmallBigSquare for the assets that saved time in my moments of weakness.